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Lunching the 60 Blog

Friendship is weird. You pick a human you’ve met and you’re like, “yup, I like this one,” and you just do stuff with them.

Yesterday, I met a long-time friend for a catch-up lunch. We started at 10:30 and left the restaurant after more than four hours. Mary lives and works about 75 miles away, so we don’t see each other as often we’d like. Email to catch up is just not as fun or useful. We talked so much (and, okay, a bit loudly), that three separate parties seated next to us asked for their seats to be changed. Too bad for them.

We last saw each other in February, so you can imagine how much we had to talk about. Rather, Mary had a lot to talk about–with her dramatic changes at work, her boyfriend temporarily moving out of the country, and mutual friends.

I enjoy our time together. For me, it feels like we’re solving everyone’s problems, ignoring other issues, fixing the nation’s political agenda, and basically just wondering why we have all the answers.

Today, I had lunch with a friend that Leslie used to work with. Jean had been with the law firm for about ten years. The firm was her “house” and they loved her! But now, as the years go by, Jean’s decided to move back to Texas to be closer to her family again. Her husband will commute from California to Texas every few weeks until he retires. But until then, it’s back-and-forth, and Jean will be happy.

Leslie isn’t happy. This is the second friend of ours in a month that has moved out of California to start a new life. Leslie doesn’t like to fly, so she’ll likely wait until Jean and/or Jeanette come to California for a visit. We may do a road trip in Spring 2018 to visit Jeanette in Washington, but until then….

As I discussed in a blog post last week, we may not all stay in our current location once we retire or stop working. It may be too expensive or no longer convenient. So you might find yourself giving up a comfortable home, plus leaving friends behind. It’s certainly not like it was when we moved from New York to California in 1982. After a short time, and perhaps a visit or two from New York to us, we lost touch with a lot of those friends. With today’s technology, of course, we can Skype and Facetime rather easily, but human touch is important.

So I’ve decided that Mary and I need to get together more than once every three or four months. We can’t afford to let too much time pass because there will be too much catch-up, and the restaurant may not let us sit there for hours on end. I can only drink so much coffee.

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One thought on “Lunching the 60 Blog”

Wow…friends moving. Years ago, my best friend Kathy and I decided to room together in college. We had everything all planned, when her dad dropped the bomb! He was moving the family to Texas (why do all my best friends move to Texas??) and that was it. We were devastated, but still stayed in touch until just the last several years. She and her husband have moved to Tennessee, Philadelphia…and even with the technology we have today, it just started getting less and less. Kim and I, on the other hand, have statyed in touch faithfully since she moved to Texas.

I cannot understand moving to another table because people were happy. THAT’S JUST SOMEHOW WRONG. I love seeing people happy and would never request another table. When I rode the train to work, the “train people” used to get together for birthdays and dinner. We were at Olive Garden one night in Riverside, celebrating Tammy’s birthday. There were four of us. We had nothing stronger than Diet Coke and Ice Tea. People stopped by our table to ask how we could be having so much fun. That’s it! People don’t know how to have fun anymore!

So I say, don’t let the sour pusses spoil your time with friends. One of my daughter’s teachers once taught her a little poem. MAKE NEW FRIENDS BUT KEEP THE OLD. ONE IS SILVER, THE OTHER GOLD. Words to live by.